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Bodger & Co bring the house down

It was question time to the department for constitutional affairs, or the Bodgers' Office, as we call it. At the moment they are knocking down the present House of Lords and the lord chancellor.

But they are still scratching their heads about what to put in the place of these ancient institutions. In this they resemble Bodger & Co, jobbing builders, hired to make a few repairs to your conservatory.

You come home and take one horrified look. "You've demolished the whole thing!" you shout. "It's nothing but a pile of rubble now!"

"Yeah, well, we knocked out that RSJ and the whole bloody thing come down. Musta been somefink wrong wiv it. Needed a damp course, I should fink."

"There was nothing wrong with it. You just had to put another strut in place, that's what the survey said!"

"Well, ask me, you're better off wivaht it. Look at that dry rot. It would 'ave 'ad to come dahn anyway. Could 'ave fallen on the kiddies."

The parliamentary secretary to the Bodgers is a young man called Christopher Leslie. He is an archetypal New Labour figure, saying the same thing over and over again in a very patient voice. He refuses to be rattled, and when he doesn't have the answer he falls back on a plenitude of jargon.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," said Ann Winterton. So Mr Leslie explained carefully, in the manner of a practised bodger, why it had to be broke in order to be fixed. "Each particular branch can now focus on their core functions," he said.

I wondered what the greatest of all lord chancellors, Sir Thomas More, would have thought back in 1535. The king, Henry VIII, might have sent a messenger to tell him that there was a plan afoot to refocus his core functions.

Aha! Did that mean he was going to get his old job back?

"No, the king says that instead of seeing you hanged, drawn and quartered, he's just going to have your head cut off. Stroke of luck, right?"

Sorry, but these people use jargon as a replacement for history.

Who needs a sense of how the past created the present when you have all these shiny new words to cover up the fact that you're ignoring it completely?

But Mr Leslie went down very well with Labour backbenchers. One, David Taylor, asked the most oleaginous question I have heard for ages. Could he congratulate the minister on a rare victory over Jeremy Paxman last night?

What next? Clapping them on the back for appearing on Esther Rantzen? "May I send warmest felicitations to my hon. friend for not being thrown off I'm A Celebrity?"

Then Alan Duncan tried a tease. "May I invite the minister to study page 53 of this week's Gay Times? Perhaps he cannot reach the top shelf to see it."

I have no idea whether Mr Leslie is gay. But I do know that, while he is on the short side, he is Michael Jordan to Mr Duncan, who looks to be roughly 4 ft 10, in heels.

Mr Duncan's point was that the paper had recorded the appointment of a second openly gay judge. He thought that if people were given jobs purely because they were gay, female, disabled or black, next they would be told to hand down gay, female or black judgments.

A good point, perhaps, though I had the eerie sense that some other, hidden, agenda was being pursued.

Huw Irranca-Davis complained about a shortage of citizens' advice bureaux. Parts of Wales, he said lugubriously, were "an advice desert."